digoio

digoio

running :observer.start from iex the processes tab shows font with light grey color that is hard to read. The system tab and others look normal (black) but various tabs with text look like this. I assume this is caused my Manjaro XFCE desktop dark theme. Anyone know why, and how to change/configure it, other than perhaps changing my desktop theme? thanks.

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NobbZ

NobbZ

Check if you can disable theming per application. Some WMs allow that.

digoio

digoio OP

I changed themes to various, same result. It must be something about my XFCE setup.

digoio

digoio OP

I also changed the default system font and tried a few other things. No change.

NobbZ

NobbZ

It might be related to some compatibility layers between whatever XFCE uses and wxWidgets, which is used by observer.

I observed similar oddities back in the days when using Eclipse in a heavily themed environment.

Most of the time, I was able to find the root cause in the eclipse codebase where color values had been hardcoded instead of using symbolic names to inherit style from the OS/WM.

I’m not sure if this is the same in your situation.

Usually I’d suggest to start the application in question as the only client to X, but I am not sure how one would do that with observer. I even had to look it up for “normal” GUI applications.

Therefore, I’d try a very lightweight WM that comes with decent or no styling at all (i3wm, awesomewm, bspwm, etc; those are known to be relatively lightweight in general). And start your application there.

This will at least tell you if the problem is with XFCE or some inherited settings.

digoio

digoio OP

Looks like in my version of Manjaro I have the following wxWidgets libraries installed (Arch pacman repo):
wxgtk-common
wxgtk2
wxgtk3
all are version 3.0.4-1

OvermindDL1

OvermindDL1

It happens on other WM’s as well, here it is on KDE for example:


The issue is because the list control used here is not using the system theme information, which is actually quite odd because wxWidgets is usually pretty good about not hard-coding colors, so I’m thinking someone just screwed up somewhere is all, maybe it’s a custom control or something.

OvermindDL1

OvermindDL1

Another reason why I’m thinking it’s a custom control is because here is a list widget that actually looks correct:

digoio

digoio OP

same for me w/XFCE.

outlog

outlog

looks like the grey/blueish color happens right here, and then probably white somewhere else (so some kind of PR against otp should be feasible, though observer looks fine here on mac:/):

https://github.com/erlang/otp/blob/master/lib/observer/src/observer_app_wx.erl#L127

OvermindDL1

OvermindDL1

/me sighs

Figured, you never ever hard-code colors unless you hardcode both the foreground and background… >.>

Though preferably always use system colors so you don’t get something horrifying like garish white on a nice dark system.

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